Figures of Reality

A Perspective on the Poetic Imagination

Roger Cardinal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040429419
• Topic: Literature
• Index: Literature

Figures of Reality (1981) may be described as a polemic against those who feel poetry to be remote from normal life – an abstruse and empty game. The author argues from a contrary perspective, shared by many poets in the Romantic and Surrealist tradition, in which poetry is viewed as being vitally related to our awareness of reality. This penetrating discourse on the roots of poetry in the imagination suggests that the fascination of an illusory image lies precisely in our consciousness of its deflection from reality. Poets can take hold of and manipulate these moments; they are adept in the construction of unreality. The deliberate cultivation of such states of awareness has been a preoccupation of many poets and literary theorists, among them Coleridge, De Quincy and Rimbaud. Roger Cardinal's commentaries on the writing of these men, as well as other texts drawn from nineteenth and twentieth century European poetry, argues that poems have meaning for us to the extent that we recognise the relationship of the figure of speech on the page to the 'figure of reality' as shaped by our perception of the world around us. In this way the book uniquely develops an original and subtle theory of the role of imagination in poetry.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Translations and References
• Part One: Getting Away From Reality
• Part Two: Coming Back to the Real
• Part Three: Signs of the Poetic
• Part Four: Figure and Reality
• Conclusion: At the Window
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index